Distill vs VideoHighlighter

Distill turns captioned YouTube videos into written summaries, with interviews, podcasts, and educational long-form video as its focus. Summaries are flowing prose divided into sections, and users can switch among summary, chapter, and transcript views. A player above the summary lets viewers jump to a chapter or moment, and each summary is followed by a short quiz. Distill relies on captions and reports when a video has no subtitles rather than inferring content from its title or description. It supports public captioned YouTube videos, focuses on videos roughly four minutes and longer, and does not support Shorts or very short clips. Users can paste a YouTube link or open one shared from YouTube or Safari. Guest access allows one summary a day for videos up to 30 minutes. An email-verified free account allows three daily summaries for videos up to 60 minutes, plus a saved library, sync, continued watching, and offline reading. Pro is $3.99 a month and includes unlimited summaries, videos up to two hours, 40+ languages, chapters, transcripts, and an outline. Distill is available on iOS.

VideoHighlighter is a desktop app that analyzes video and creates highlight reels or individual clips. It scores scene, motion, audio, object, action, and transcript signals, then shows the reasons in a timeline and report. Reports also identify strong moments that missed the cut and transcript claims that were not measured. Video, transcripts, detections, and local models stay on disk; analysis, search, and export do not upload footage. The basic pipeline needs no API key, and a GPU is optional because current CPUs can run it. The free edition includes offline analysis, live face detection, VR side-by-side playback, CLIP search, composition rules, model training, and a model hub. Pro adds live object and action overlays, point-and-teach categories, open-vocabulary detection, similarity search, and counter or scoreboard detection. Prebuilt downloads are available for Windows and macOS; Linux runs from source using pip and Python. The free repository is under AGPL-3.0, with a separate commercial license. Individual Pro costs $49, paid once for one editor on up to five computers.